Along with TAPL, I like Essentials of Programming Languages. It's an introductory text going through a series of interpreters each adding new language features and covering alternative ways to implement things or accomplish a goal (an example, it covers various methods of parameter passing like pass by reference or value and so on).

Types and Programming Languages (TAPL) by Benjamin C. Pierce. Basically IMO the main differentiator between languages is their type system. It’s basically table stakes now for programming languages to provide generics so users can write their own type-safe containers, and one simply cannot implement this without some theoretical background like TAPL.

In contrast you can easily skim Chapter 7, Semantic Analysis and realize this book gives extremely rudimentary information on type systems. Even if you were to design a dynamically typed language, this book doesn’t cover user-defined structs let alone modern essentials like user-defined sum types or closures.